Ancient DNA And Spatial Modeling Reveal Pre-Inca Trans-Andean Parrot Trade

Parrots captured in the Amazon rainforest by pre-Inca people were transported hundreds of miles over the Andes to arid coastal areas where they were kept for their colorful feathers.

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The scarlet macaw (Ara macao) is a large red, yellow, and blue South American parrot, a member of a large group of Neotropical parrots called macaws. It is native to humid evergreen forests of tropical South America. (Credit: Jabid Ishtiaque / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

People have always loved parrots, as evidenced by the lengths they go to in order to obtain and keep them. A recent study highlights this human trait after a number of brightly-colored feathers were excavated from several ancient tombs on coastal Peru — tombs that pre-date the Inca Empire. Surprisingly, these colorful feathers came from several parrot species, none of which live anywhere near the coast. How did these feathers end up in these tombs? Were the feathers gathered in the rainforest, as some researchers proposed, or were live parrots captured in the Amazon Rainforest and moved over the Andes to the coast?

An international collaboration of scientists based in Peru, Spain, the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia wondered the same things. The scientists analyzed parrot feathers discovered at the ancient village of Pachakamaq that was first inhabited around 200 BCE. This village, located on the central coast in present-day Peru (Figure 1), is home to the archaeological site, Oracle of Pachakamaq, and to the Inca Temple of the Sun (constructed much later). The Inca annexed the Ychsma around 1470, who apparently had a far-reaching trade network that spanned at least half a continent.

F I G U R E 1 | Archaeological context of the Ychsma burials at Pachacamac. a Map of Peru showing the Pachacamac Archaeological Site within the estimated territory of the Ychsma culture (gray shading) and our extended study area on the inlet map (orange shading). Map was created using QGIS v3.3 with ESRI World Topo as basemap. b Plan of the Pachacamac Sacred Precinct, with the location of Tomb 1/2 highlighted in red. c, d Drawings of the upper and lower layers of Tomb 1/2, respectively, showing the arrangement of funerary bundles. The highlighted bundles with red indicate the location of bundles mentioned in this study. e The 2005 excavation in progress in front of the Painted Temple (also known as Temple of Pachacamac). f Funerary Bundles B and C in situ in the lower level of the tomb. g A representative feather ornament from Bundle C, composed of feather bundles tied to cotton cords. Photos by I. Shimada. (doi:10.1038/s41467–026–69167–9)

As it turned out, the ancient parrot feathers were part of a funerary headdress found in a Ychsma noble’s tomb that dated back to 1100–1400 AD. Ychsma was an indigenous polity that pre-dated the Inca Empire by centuries. After the rise of the Inca Empire around 1470, Ychsma was absorbed and reorganized by the Inca as a province that became known as Pachakamaq. Pachakamaq (“Earth-Maker”) is a village on Peru’s arid coast that lies far outside the parrots’ native rainforest range.

Parrot feathers worn as ornaments indicated high social status

Ancient Ychsma elites visually communicated their high social status by wearing headdresses adorned with colorful feathers from parrots.

“We feel that the striking Amazonian parrot feathers were valued by the coastal and highland populations for two major reasons: (1) their exotic origins and (2) vivid colors,” distinguished professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University and the study’s senior author, Izumi Shimada, told me in email. Professor Shimada’s expertise is the archaeology of complex pre-Hispanic cultures in the Andes, including the role of ideology and organized religion in cultural developments.

“Something exotic in the sense of mythical and/or far distant origins possesses a great deal of power over our mind. In ancient time, when most people did not travel far from their home, the ‘exotic land’ had a mythical aura that could be manipulated by elites for enhancing their power etc.,” Professor Shimada explained in email. “Thus, these birds, being native to Amazonia, had a great deal of symbolic value and power. Their feathers are not only colorful, but are truly vivid so that they awaken our senses. In fact, these colors are not easy to replicate artificially. These are some of the likely reasons why the Amazonian parrots and their feathers were valued.”

“What we can say is that ancient Andean populations started to use colorful bird feathers for ritual and ornamental purposes by the late third millennium BC. Feathers were used most widely for feathered cloaks and other clothing and ritual items,” Professor Shimada told me in email.

The feathers adorned only a few Ychsma funerary headdresses within the Pachakamaq necropolis located near present-day Lima, Peru. The presence of these feathers imply the Ychsma had a sophisticated knowledge of ecology and landscape long before the Inca Empire arose.

Ancient parrot feathers found in a Ychsma tomb in Pachakamaq. (Credit: George Olah.)

“Because the chemical signatures in their feathers reflect a coastal diet, we know they lived on the coast for a significant amount of time — at least several months to a year, and likely longer,” said the study’s lead author, conservation ecologist George Olah, a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at The Australian National University (ANU).

Although it is not clear how long these parrots actually lived in captivity, Dr Olah reported that “[t]hey had to be kept alive on the coast long enough to undergo a complete natural moult and grow entirely new plumage in their new environment.”

Genetic analysis reveals parrot feathers’ secrets

“Our ancient habitat modelling confirmed that the western side of the Andes was just as inhospitable to these species one thousand years ago as it is today,” Dr Olah explained in email. “These parrots are strictly rainforest dwellers with a natural home range of around 150 kilometres [about 93 miles].”

“The fact that they ended up more than 500 kilometres away, on the other side of South America’s highest mountain range, proves human intervention,” Dr Olah said.

“They do not naturally fly over the Andes.”

“Through our ancient DNA analysis, we successfully identified four parrot species and a seabird,” Dr Olah elaborated in email. “The most prominent were the large macaws, specifically the Scarlet Macaw, Blue-and-yellow Macaw, and Red-and-green Macaw, and we also found many feathers of the Mealy Amazon. We also identified a white feather that came from a pelagic bird, the Sabine Gull, an arctic breeder that winters along the Peruvian coast.”

Maximum Likelihood tree based on mitochondrial genome sequences (15,455 bp), showing the placement of the six ancient feather samples from Pachacamac within the macaw genus Ara. The analysis confirms the identity of the samples as Ara ararauna, A. chloropterus, and A. macao (illustrated respectively from top to bottom, scaled relative to each other). The tree includes sequences from modern Peruvian Ara ararauna macaw samples (BYMA01, BYMA04) and other reference specimens (n = 48, including outgroup). Numbers at nodes indicate bootstrap support; circles denote 100% support. Samples from this study are highlighted. Illustrations [by Lluís Sanz] courtesy of Cornell Lab of Ornithology, from Birds of the World (https://doi.org/10.2173/bow). (doi:10.1038/s41467–026–69167–9)

“Our genomic analysis allowed us to look at the genetic profiles of each feather we managed to extract aDNA,” Dr Olah explained in email. “We found high genetic diversity among the feathers of the same species. This proves that these individuals were procured from the wild Amazonian gene pool, rather than being the product of a closed, inbred local captive breeding programme (as shown for example at the Paquimé site of northern Mexico).” (Read more about Paquimé here and here.)

This research is one of the first successful analyses of ancient DNA that was isolated from archaeological feathers, which opens new avenues for tracking how organic materials moved through ancient trade networks worldwide.

Biochemical analyses of parrot feathers peeks inside their ‘chemical diary’

These feathers were not plucked and collected in the rainforest as some people thought, but instead, they came from parrots that had been living in coastal regions for some significant length of time. Carbon dating suggested the oldest funereal feathers dated to some time between 1100 C.E. to 1225 C.E.

“We can now demonstrate with genetic and isotopic evidence that these parrots weren’t just traded as feathers — they were transported alive, across dramatic terrain, into coastal ritual contexts,” Dr Olah pointed out.

“Our isotopic analysis acts as a chemical diary, and it revealed a dietary shift. In the Amazon, they ate a wild rainforest diet of C3 plants,” Dr Olah told me in email.

Dr Olah and collaborators’ analysis of the biochemical signatures within the feather structures revealed that the birds’ diets shifted to C4 plants, such as maize, and to marine protein, revealing they were alive after crossing the Andes.

“However, the feathers found at Pachacamac showed a signature dominated by C4 plants. This means they were probably fed a coastal diet of local maize, which — based on our N isotopic data — was possibly fertilised by marine seabird guano.”

“Our analysis reveals the parrots were fed the same nitrogen-enriched diet consumed by their captors — a clear sign of prolonged care after their removal from the rainforest,” Dr Olah explained.

Although there is some evidence to suggest they were kept in captivity, the location of these structures remains elusive.

“We have not found specific physical cages at Pachacamac, so they were possibly kept somewhere else along the coast,” Dr Olah said in email. “Archaeological evidence from elsewhere suggests they were likely kept in dedicated aviary structures. But anything else would be highly speculative, as our results are based on individual feathers used for headdresses and not on entire parrot remains.”

Live parrots were transported across the Andes Mountains

Mathematical landscape modelling by Dr Olah, Professor Shimada and collaborators suggested the most probable trans-Andean corridors and river routes were followed to transport the birds, revealing a highly sophisticated trading network across deserts, highlands, and rainforests.

Transporting the parrots likely took weeks or months, as travellers made their way through steep plateaus and rugged mountain passes, a time when these tropical birds faced extreme temperatures, strange food and other perils of long distance travel. It seems a wonder that they survived at all.

“It seems like they navigated longer but significantly lower northern corridors (around 3,000 metres), but a second more direct route to the Amazon rainforest also showed to be as a likely path,” Dr Olah told me in email.

“This discovery challenges long-held assumptions that pre-Inca societies were isolated or fragmented.”

“Instead, we see evidence of organised exchange, ecological knowledge and logistical planning that connected vastly different environments long before imperial roads formalised these connections.”

This multi provided extraordinary details of these parrots’ lives as well those of the humans that prized them.

I think this elegant study is indicative of how scientists can make big discoveries by following a collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach to deciphering disparate clues so we can better understand what the Inca and other ancient Indigenous cultures knew about the world they lived in.

[embed]doi:10.1038/s41467–026–69167–9

Source:

George Olah, Pere Bover, Bastien Llamas, Holly Heiniger, Rafael Segura Llanos & Izumi Shimada (2026). Ancient DNA and spatial modeling reveal a pre-Inca trans-Andean parrot trade, *Nature Communications *17: 2117 | doi:10.1038/s41467–026–69167–9

NOTE: No AI tools were used in the research, writing or editing of this piece.

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Originally published on Forbes.com on 20 April 2026.